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It is possible to reconcile all these apparent contradictions-
the divine sowing to birth, as opposed to a voluntary descent
aiming at the completion of the universe; the judgement and the
cave; necessity and free choice- in fact the necessity includes
the choice-embodiment as an evil; the Empedoclean teaching of a
flight from God, a wandering away, a sin bringing its punishment;
the "solace by flight" of Heraclitus; in a word a voluntary
descent which is also voluntary.
All degeneration is no doubt involuntary, yet when it has been
brought about by an inherent tendency, that submission to the
inferior may be described as the penalty of an act.
On the other hand these experiences and actions are determined by
an external law of nature, and they are due to the movement of a
being which in abandoning its superior is running out to serve
the needs of another: hence there is no inconsistency or untruth
in saying that the soul is sent down by God; final results are
always to be referred to the starting point even across many
intervening stages.
Still there is a twofold flaw: the first lies in the motive of
the Soul's descent [its audacity, its Tolma], and the second in
the evil it does when actually here: the first is punished by
what the soul has suffered by its descent: for the faults
committed here, the lesser penalty is to enter into body after
body- and soon to return- by judgement according to desert, the
word judgement indicating a divine ordinance; but any outrageous
form of ill-doing incurs a proportionately greater punishment
administered under the surveillance of chastising daimons.
Thus, in sum, the soul, a divine being and a dweller in the
loftier realms, has entered body; it is a god, a later phase of
the divine: but, under stress of its powers and of its tendency
to bring order to its next lower, it penetrates to this sphere in
a voluntary plunge: if it turns back quickly, all is well; it
will have taken no hurt by acquiring the knowledge of evil and
coming to understand what sin is, by bringing its forces into
manifest play, by exhibiting those activities and productions
which, remaining merely potential in the unembodied, might as
well never have been even there, if destined never to come into
actuality, so that the soul itself would never have known that
suppressed and inhibited total.
The act reveals the power, a power hidden, and we might almost
say obliterated or nonexistent, unless at some moment it became
effective: in the world as it is, the richness of the outer stirs
us all to the wonder of the inner whose greatness is displayed in
acts so splendid.
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